Poll: Teen Shot dead after attempting to mug man

[Guitar Gamer]

Well from what the news article it would appear the jogger was attacked without even given a chance to peacfully give up his valuables.
It sounds awful but I may have to side with the jogger, I mean it may be a bit rash to kill someone for one punch but hell if you think some guy is gunna kill you and you can defend yourself I can't really blame you for doing so,

Going on the offensive after one punch is one thing, but carrying around a firearm for the sole purpose of committing murder upon any random human being who might appear threatening to you, is another matter entirely.

That jogger had taken the decision to commit murder weeks before those two children even tried to rob him, and that makes all the difference in the world.

You have a very good point there. Especially considering the fact that this jogger probably had not been attacked previously in his life.

 

[Vicarious Reality]

I'm 90% certain that he was justified in defending himself like that.
Just like the poll.

 

[spectrenihlus]

I think a few people are forgetting that a very good deterrent against mugging and other criminal acts like this is that the person you are targeting can and has the right to stop you which usually ends up with the attacker dead.

Well, I do believe he did in fact have a reason to fire his weapon on the attacker. But eight times is a little unnecessary.

I doubt you have time to think of what you are doing in that type of scenario.

 

[teisjm]

So a dude stands up to defend himself, from unsuspected assailants, attacking him unprovoked from out of no-where.
Seems reasonable to me.
Excpecting the man to get a full grasp of the situation, the assailants age (if that even matters) and whetehr or not he is armed, when knocked down out of the blue, fearing for his life, is a little too much to demand in my oppinion.

Besides, muggers don't really have much sympathy from my side.

 

[Magical029]

OK. I'll simplify this for you.

Baker has no gun.
The teens knock him out. Baker loses money.
The teens knock him out, he dies from it. Baker loses money and his life.
The teens kill him with fists/other nearby objects. Baker loses money and his life.

Baker has a gun but does not use it.
The teens knock him out. Baker loses money and his gun.
The teens knock him out, he dies from it. Baker loses money, gun and life.
The teens kill him with fists/other nearby object. Baker loses money, gun and life.
The teens kill him with the gun, they are arrested. Baker loses money, life and gun.

Baker has a gun and uses it.
The teens attack him, he shoots one and hits enough times to kill him. Baker gains a heavy conscience.
The teens attack him, he shoots both, killing both. Baker gains a very heavy conscience.
The teens attack him, he shoots but misses. They do what the adult said they would do. Baker loses money and gun.
The teens attack him, he shoots but misses. They kill him with fists/other nearby object. Baker loses money, gun and life.

Hmm. Notice - lots of dead Bakers, eh?

 

[Samurai Silhouette]

Jogging in the middle of the night? (Totally not looking for trouble?)
Carrying 500... not dollars, but £ pounds? (European wanting to play in our sandbox and taking the piss about our gun laws? Why was that even mentioned? And why would you even carry around cash like that jogging?)
Carrying a .45 caliber handgun with a laser sight and hollow points? (Like jogging with a brick in your pocket, Overkill?)

Sounds like he was just looking for a reason to play with his new toy. I'm all for the stand your ground law if used genuinely, but that dude was just looking for someone to kill... he was a fucking hunter.

 

[fulano]

The issue seems to be that he shot eight times, not whethe ror not he was justified to "Stand His Grownd" as per the law of the state.

I kinda think "Did he really have to shoot eight times?" I'd say not. Not one person trying to make a reasonable argument would say so. BUT...If you've been smacked hard across the face so that your sight has blurred and you have a gun in your jacket pocket--or wherever you keep it concealed--you're gonna pull it, and more than likely you're gonna fire it.

But how many times should you fire it? Wel...enough times. But then again, when is enough enough? Well, that is the question, ain't it? And I'd like to make the case that that particularly has no real correct answer, as I'll outline below...

First: The guy who got mugged is just a regular guy. He's not law enforcement, military, or private security contractor, etc.; he's just a guy with a gun who more likely than not took classes on how to shoot th ething but that's as far as he went with it.

Second: In times of great stress it is known that our perception of time becomes modified as we enter in either fight or flight modes. It s more than likely to assume that the guy felt like he was about to fucking die and he was running out of time, even if the whole thing lasted just a second, and thus he felt he had to act fast and so he took out his piece and, well, used it. How many times? I honestly don't think he knew immediately and just pulled the trigger and got carried away until he felt it was enough...wait, what? Yup. Think about it: people are known to have simply been carried away in the middle of a fight when trading blows and moving around, when adrenaline is coursing through their veins, going above and beyond the point when they are clearly the victor and someone ends up badly hurt, we've all heard of different cases.

But what we are talking about here is of a shooting where all you have to do is pull the trigger repeatedly; all you are required to do is twitch your finger slightly and there is no real notion of anything else, just that single moment when you are scared shitless, probably not even sure if you're gonna make it out alive, and when that slight motion is all there is to the world--and it is not even a complex task. Just a fucking twitch.

The issue I have with this case is more with the ravenous third parties of stupid-ass morons arguing that the kid deserved to die for trying to mug the guy than with the guy taking the shots--the kid did not deserve that. I'd like to tell the lot of you that that's not the standard of a civilized culture, you backwards, Taliban-like twats. This whole thing was an accident where a guy took a split second decision when he though he was gonna kick the bucket and a dumbass kid died for it. There's no right or wrong here, just a fucked up situation that could not have gone differently given the people involved.

Grow the fuck up.

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

I agree. What if the shooter simply pulled out his gun? Would the mugger have fled upon realising the danger to his life? Or even just a bullet to the leg. I don't think the shooter should be punished but this is a case of excessive force.

When your attacked, you do not have time to think or chance to risk that "the person that is attacking me will surrender/retreat if he sees me with the gun and won't dive for it and use it on me."

Shooting in the legs also very stupid since A. the legs are tend to move a lot and are hard to hit in a pinch and B. if you do hit them, they are still likely to die since one of the bodies primary blood veins is in the legs and will cause a person to bleed out in seconds.

As for shooting four bullets, a person tends to pull the trigger multiple times since you could always miss the first shot/it not hitting anything important.

 

[Taham]

Perhaps death wasn't the best outcome, but Baker had a choice and he took it. He is innocent.

 

[Shoqiyqa]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

Point one: the Daily Mail is an untrustworthy source, pandering to the angry mob version of the "moral majority" with stories phrased as provocatively as they can be. They hate everybody. They're like Fox News on anything left-wing or free, like very angry communists on anything right-wing, like Nuremberg without time for a proper trial on fascists, like Nazis on equal rights campaigners and generally full of hate and shit.

I believe he had a legitimate reason to fire, he had a CCW permit, he was attacked by 2 people, and feared for his life.

I agree except that I don't actually see what the permit has to do with him shooting. To take an extreme case, if three guys grab a 7-yr-old girl in the park and set about raping her in the bushes and her 9-yr-old sister shoots them, that's just as legitimate a "just cause" shooting as it would have been if a soldier, policeman or legally-armed adult citizen had shot them. Under those circumstances, **** whose gun it is and perforate the scum.

It's a shame, such a waste ...

... of what?

The only problem I see is that he shot the teenager 4 times, but that's about it.

If you're in a situation where it's right to shoot a person to stop them doing something, you shoot them until they're not doing it any more. You don't shoot him once and then wait to see whether he's going to grab your gun or surrender. Single bullet-wounds aren't all that fatal unless they're well-placed. There are statistics on people surviving various gunshot wounds in the arguments about arming the UK police here [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.286226-Poll-Arming-the-UK-Police?page=17], along with why you don't shoot to wound and why spraying hundreds of rounds of 9mm around a crowded city is a bad idea (someone needed telling) and a few other things.

But at the same time, I don't think the shooter should be punished for defending himself, especially if he had the license to carry the weapon.

Again, I don't see why him having a licence to carry the weapon makes any difference to whether he was right to use it in that situation. If he didn't have the licence he could be punished for carrying the weapon without the licence, but not for using it, imo.

I agree. What if the shooter simply pulled out his gun? Would the mugger have fled upon realising the danger to his life? Or even just a bullet to the leg. I don't think the shooter should be punished but this is a case of excessive force.

See Arming the UK Police? [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.286226-Poll-Arming-the-UK-Police?page=17] for why you don't just shoot someone in the leg or look at this diagram [http://howmed.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/femoral-artery.png], which contains a hint. As for just pulling the gun and hoping to scare them off, that works fine if they're 10 metres away but is pretty stupid at under 1m, where they presumably were if one of them had just punched him. See also the rules:

It's always pointing somewhere.
Never point in any direction you're not prepared to fire.
Never fire at anything you're not out to destroy.
Assume it's loaded.
There's only one control inside the trigger guard, and it has only one purpose: to drop the hammer. If you're not dropping the hammer, you don't need to have a finger inside the trigger guard.

You shouldn't be pulling it on him if you're not in a position where shooting him's a really great idea, and if you're in that position you should ******* well shoot him.

And the loss of his life is a tragic waste.

Again, of what? A mugger? An American citizen? A human? None of them are endangered species.

Sorry but I have to disagree with a lot of people here. It was just a couple of kids and the guy shot him eight times. He could have fired a warning shot, ...

NO NO NO NO NO!!!

It's not just a couple of kids. A 16-yr-old and an 18-yr-old add up to a lot of muscle muss, four fists, four feet, four trigger fingers and four hands that could have knives in. Adults have been killed by punches and kicks from unarmed 18-yr-old "kids" here. People have been killed by kids who were actual kids, not old enough to sign up, drive and vote, quite a lot around the world. 18 is quite possibly as big as or bigger than the victim. He certainly considered himself big enough and hard enough to take the guy down and rob him, and 18's old enough to be responsible for that decision and its consequences.

Also: you don't fire warning shots. Warning shots don't come out of the barrel, remember they're warning shots and just disappear. They're bullets. They do what they're designed to do: carry kinetic energy away until they hit something, then transfer that energy into whatever they hit. In video games, bullets that hit scenery (or "Brush: Structural" in some cases) tend to turn into black circles and just stay there. In reality, that lead is still out there and that kinetic energy and momentum have to go somewhere. Shoot a free-hanging Masterlock [http://theboxotruth.com/docs/bot5.htm] with a 9mm and the energy goes into flattening the bullet and jamming the lock up, and that's okay. Shoot it with a .45 and it goes into flattening the bullet without even jamming the lock, and that's okay too, but shoot a solid concrete kerbstone or paving slab or a tarmac road or a brick wall or a car engine and you get this fascinating effect called a ricochet which, no matter what you may find in games or historic articles or films called Blown Away, is a rather unpredictable object. It's a junk of jagged metal going at somewhere between 100mph and maybe 600mph, tumbling as it goes, just inviting fate to put some unlucky innocent's flesh in its way and ruin your life.

The guy shot 8 times, only hit 4. The doesn't seem to be a crack shot or really trained because 50% is pretty bad, especially at close range. One could wager that the guy got punched in the face, pulled the gun, and started firing randomly in the general direction of his attackers. And considering he only aimed and didn't shoot at the other kid who ran away showed that he actually did have some constraint.

This seems reasonable.

It would be pretty silly to chide someone for reacting in the way he did, if someone starts beating on me, it doesn't make sense to try and run back, pull a gun, and try to get the attackers to surrender. Another fist could easily hit you in the back of the head or temple and knock you out, the attackers are close enough and possibly stupid enough that when you're pulling the gun and not firing they could try to take it. And who knows the story could've gone much differently if the guy didn't come out with his gun firing, he could've ended up with the gun turned against him and him dead on the ground and two teens at large with money in their pocket laughing it up.

This, too. The part that does bother me is where the other four went. It must take a very level head to do it, but the right thing to do immediately after an incident like that is check where eight bullets finished up and whether anybody else is hurt. The shot mugger can bleed out while I check the locals, in fact.

Also: I'm curious why he shot so many times, and why he'd think someone was armed if they'd just punched him in the face.

How long did it take you to think of that? Half a second? Two seconds? Three? Ten? How long did he have to think about it?

He shot until the threat to his life wasn't threatening his life.

And further more, aren't hollow-point bullets designed to cause more damage? Why is a man walking around with a handgun full of those?

That's a yes-and-no answer. They're designed to open up on impact and make a bigger hole, bringing the target down more quickly, which is good for not having to chase deer for miles and good for quickly stopping the nutter with the AK47 in the mall from doing any more damage, and to make that bigger hole and do all that damage to a metal bullet takes more energy, which has to come from the bullet's kinetic energy, so the bullet loses velocity, making it rather less dangerous 100m down the street or the far side of a couple of interior walls after it's been through the target and meaning it's lost momentum, which goes into the target, meaning he gets knocked back harder. I've seen the argument that the increased likelihood of knocking him down with one or two shots means you're less likely to have to shoot him four or five times so he's more likely to survive ... but I don't feel like agreeing with that, haven't checked the data to know whether it's true and don't really care about the survival of some _______ who jumps me in the park half as much as I care about the kids looking over the park from bedroom windows behind him at the time.

To my knowledge, hollow points are designed to hit and not penetrate through the other side.

Nah, that's frangibles, like Glaser Safety Slugs. $14-20 for 6 rounds [http://www.shopcorbon.com/Glaser-Safety-Slug/500/500/dept] versus $20-25 for 20 rounds JHP [http://www.shopcorbon.com/Glaser-PowRBall/600/600/dept] makes them a rather expensive habitual load, though, and you wouldn't want to carry the weapon loaded with a round you're not used to firing.

He didn't gun down the kid who ran away, so he must have had some sense of control, not just a berserk rage.

Indeed.

You know he could of just pistol whipped him, or shot him in the leg in self defence, rather than shoot him eight times with the intention of making him dead.

Wrong. See above about warning shots and disabling shots. If you're not out to shoot him dead, don't shoot him. Try to pistol-whip someone who knows what he's doing and isn't woozy from being punched in the mouth and you're likely to have the pistol taken off you and your arm broken or your arm folded round until the gun's pointing at your head, still in your hand.

no one has the right to kill anybody no matter what they do.

Seriously?!? That "89" in your username isn't your year of birth, is it? You can't really have hit 22 years old without ever hearing about a situation that warranted killing someone, can you?

And that one of those is apparently wired tight enough to pump eight rounds into a guy in "self-defense."

Firstly, getting jumped on and punched in the face can result it an adrenalin rush that makes someone go from "relaxed" to "wired tight" in a couple of heartbeats, meaning inside one second.

Secondly, it wasn't "self-defense." It was self-defence. He was defending himself.

The fact that this happened and so many people condone it sickens me. Why not just make mugging punishable by the death penalty? It's the equivalent.

Heh. If they were willing to follow through with their logic, which they have proven they are not. Why use that line of reasoning if you can't defend it all the way?

Okay. Fine. You want some sort of sensible response to your bollocks? Here you go.

I'm a woman, driving alone at night. I'm approaching a traffic light. It's red, so I slow down and cruise towards it in 2nd (that's 2nd gear, something manual-transmission cars have), hoping not to have to stop before it goes green for me. There's nobody else around until, suddenly, six young men with four big knives, a crowbar, a small revolver, a roll of duct tape, six hard-ons and six woolly ski masks come out of an alley and rush to surround the car.

I kick the clutch and accelerator to the floor, making the engine scream, ease the clutch back up and tear forwards through the red light, leaving them behind. I have just run a red light, but the law says it was okay under the circumstances. I may well have run over a foot or two in the process, but the law says that's okay too under the circumstances.

With me so far?

Now let's say the same thing happens to another woman and she's stupid and gets hauled out of the car and gang-raped in that alley. Does that justify always running that red light? No, probably not.

See the difference? One of them's action taken to prevent violent criminals from completing their violent crime at the time. The other's action taken afterwards because they did the crime.

I dont feel the same pity that I think most would if they just heard the story and only heard what the title said.

This is a good point. The title says "after" and it would be more accurate to say "while" there.

A) who the hell carries a revolver (with hollow point and a laser sight he must think hes a hit man or something..)

A revolver? He fired eight shots from a .45 revolver? Colour me IMPRESSED!

going out on a late night run..? And its was a concealed weapon, who other than the police and the army carry licenses for a pistol and to also conceal it..?

Pretty much everybody in Florida, last I heard. Which licences are available and to whom varies a lot. Some states will charge you with brandishing if someone catches a glimpse of your weapon under your jacket. Some will call it concealed if you close the flap on the holster.

B) who goes out on late night runs, just ludicrous..

Apparently, young men wanting to join the military do. So do people who work night shifts or late evening shifts, like bar staff, restaurant waiters, security guards, soldiers, caretakers, hospital janitors, nurses, doctors, firemen, the police, truckers, gritter drivers .....

What? You want to impose an overnight curfew on everybody? "Ihr Papieren, bitte."

C) if you have a license for said concealed gun then why isn't he trained to use it properly and knee-cap his attacker instead of shooting them, 4 times, in the chest..

Shooting the guy in the chest IS using the gun properly.

D) these muggers were unarmed and posed a seriously limited effect to his life and so fatal force was unnecessary.

Posed an effect? WTF?

Unarmed muggers are potentially lethal. Unarmed muggers who knock you out and take your gun are potentially lethal to you and a lot of other people afterwards. People have been killed by punches. People have been killed by thugs who beat them to the ground and kicked them in the head for having the temerity to ask them to turn the stereo down.

How the heck was he supposed to be sure they were unarmed?

F) death is not a suitable punishment for battery, if it was then the death rate by state execution would amount to something like several hundred thousand per year whereas its only about 100 or more currently..

Self-defence is not the same thing as punishment. When attacked, you deal with the fact you are being attacked. One you are no longer being attacked, you do things like calling the police, making statements, getting checked out at hospital, going to court and so on. The court sentences people to periods in jail or fines them or whatever as punishment and/or deterrent and/or to rehabilitate them afterwards. It can't go back in time and teleport the mugger into jail to prevent him smashing your face in in the first place. Stopping him from doing that is self-defence. It's not the same thing.

EDIT: also soldiers, are always told to inform any civilians that they will open fire if said civilian does not surrender. Kinda proves that no-one outside of law-enforcement and the army should be allowed a gun, and these groups having guns is debatable as well..

Bullshit and WTF?

Bullshit that soldiers warn everybody. If a soldier on patrol sees someone aiming a rifle into the married quarters with his finger on the trigger or someone crouching next to the back wall of a packed bar with his hands in a sports bag with loops of wire protruding from it, that someone is getting shot with no warning. You don't **** around warning someone who's in a position to kill you, your mate's wife or a couple of dozen others in quarter of a second. You shoot him.

WTF are you on with not wanting the army to have guns? Seriously, wtf do you expect an army without guns to do? Tap the nice Special Police gentleman on the shoulder and ask him if he wouldn't mind awfully pulling his cock back out of the Kosovar Albanian girl, pulling his trousers back up and letting her and her mother go home? Throw dung at the IRA? Charge at the Taliban wielding sharpened slices of mango?

And for a former military man ... Maybe he was old, and it's been a while.

Citing the state's 'stand your ground' law they ruled the 28-year-old was entitled to protect himself.

Baker, who was out jogging to get fit before applying to join the military, said he always carried a handgun.

I think the people who are complaining about the 8 shots aren't considering the situation. It's dark, the victim of the mugging's been hit in the head and is dizzy. How's he going to even know how many shots actually hit the guy? As far as I can tell in a situation like that the only indication that he's hit the guy enough will be if the guy goes down. Similarly the people complaining about him not shooting the mugger in the leg seem to not be considering the situation either. How's he going to aim at the guy's leg in the dark when he's been hit in the head? And it isn't as if the mugger is going to sit there waiting for him to shoot him in the leg.

As for not warning the mugger that he has a gun, the mugger is right in his face hitting him. Does that really give him the distance to hold the mugger off with the gun? Is he in a state to hold onto the gun should the mugger try and take it from him? I'm highly doubtful the answer to either of those is yes.

As for the few that act as if this is the same as calling for the death sentence for all muggers, that's utter nonsense. The danger inherent in that situation is why it would be justified to shoot, and possibly kill, the mugger. Once they're nicely sitting in a jail cell, then we can afford to have mercy on them without endangering people.

Thank goodness you're here.

I notice how they have a lovely smiling picture of the teen and a deranged looking police shot of Baker!

Caption under second picture:

Accused: Suspect Jared Loughner is alleged to have shot dead six people in a gun rampage in Arizona last weekend

Jogging in the middle of the night?

Maybe he works 2pm to 10pm. Maybe he works 7pm to 7am four out of seven nights. Maybe he used to have a very fit dog and got into the habit. Maybe he couldn't sleep. Maybe it's too hot for jogging before that.

Is going out after 9pm looking for trouble now? Great! Let's just arrest everybody whos out after 9pm because they're all obviously looking for trouble.

Carrying a .45 caliber handgun with a laser sight and hollow points? (Like jogging with a brick in your pocket, Overkill?)

You get a gun with which you can shoot effectively. You don't get one gun for the house during the day, one for the house during the night, one for the car, one for the truck, one for walking the dog, one for jogging without the dog, one for shopping, one for the office, one for your gym bag, one for going camping, one for going camping on hunting trips, one for taking out the trash and one for going out to get the newspaper.

You can also get these wonderful things called holsters now that mean you don't actually have to carry the gun in your pocket.

Sounds like he was just looking for a reason to play with his new toy. I'm all for the stand your ground law if used genuinely, but that dude was just looking for someone to kill... he was a fucking hunter.

Ah, a European, so he can't possibly be trusted with a gun. Europeans all go nuts when they get near guns because they're not used to them. He must have been out looking for an excuse to kill somebody, not like all those calm, mature, sensible American gun-owners who've grown up with them and know how to keep their cool and really almost never use them.

Sure.

Right.

Obviously.

 

[Jazoni89]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

Point one: the Daily Mail is an untrustworthy source, pandering to the angry mob version of the "moral majority" with stories phrased as provocatively as they can be. They hate everybody. They're like Fox News on anything left-wing or free, like very angry communists on anything right-wing, like Nuremberg without time for a proper trial on fascists, like Nazis on equal rights campaigners and generally full of hate and shit.

I believe he had a legitimate reason to fire, he had a CCW permit, he was attacked by 2 people, and feared for his life.

I agree except that I don't actually see what the permit has to do with him shooting. To take an extreme case, if three guys grab a 7-yr-old girl in the park and set about raping her in the bushes and her 9-yr-old sister shoots them, that's just as legitimate a "just cause" shooting as it would have been if a soldier, policeman or legally-armed adult citizen had shot them. Under those circumstances, **** whose gun it is and perforate the scum.

It's a shame, such a waste ...

... of what?

The only problem I see is that he shot the teenager 4 times, but that's about it.

If you're in a situation where it's right to shoot a person to stop them doing something, you shoot them until they're not doing it any more. You don't shoot him once and then wait to see whether he's going to grab your gun or surrender. Single bullet-wounds aren't all that fatal unless they're well-placed. There are statistics on people surviving various gunshot wounds in the arguments about arming the UK police here [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.286226-Poll-Arming-the-UK-Police?page=17], along with why you don't shoot to wound and why spraying hundreds of rounds of 9mm around a crowded city is a bad idea (someone needed telling) and a few other things.

But at the same time, I don't think the shooter should be punished for defending himself, especially if he had the license to carry the weapon.

Again, I don't see why him having a licence to carry the weapon makes any difference to whether he was right to use it in that situation. If he didn't have the licence he could be punished for carrying the weapon without the licence, but not for using it, imo.

I agree. What if the shooter simply pulled out his gun? Would the mugger have fled upon realising the danger to his life? Or even just a bullet to the leg. I don't think the shooter should be punished but this is a case of excessive force.

See Arming the UK Police? [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.286226-Poll-Arming-the-UK-Police?page=17] for why you don't just shoot someone in the leg or look at this diagram [http://howmed.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/femoral-artery.png], which contains a hint. As for just pulling the gun and hoping to scare them off, that works fine if they're 10 metres away but is pretty stupid at under 1m, where they presumably were if one of them had just punched him. See also the rules:

It's always pointing somewhere.
Never point in any direction you're not prepared to fire.
Never fire at anything you're not out to destroy.
Assume it's loaded.
There's only one control inside the trigger guard, and it has only one purpose: to drop the hammer. If you're not dropping the hammer, you don't need to have a finger inside the trigger guard.

You shouldn't be pulling it on him if you're not in a position where shooting him's a really great idea, and if you're in that position you should ******* well shoot him.

And the loss of his life is a tragic waste.

Again, of what? A mugger? An American citizen? A human? None of them are endangered species.

Sorry but I have to disagree with a lot of people here. It was just a couple of kids and the guy shot him eight times. He could have fired a warning shot, ...

NO NO NO NO NO!!!

It's not just a couple of kids. A 16-yr-old and an 18-yr-old add up to a lot of muscle muss, four fists, four feet, four trigger fingers and four hands that could have knives in. Adults have been killed by punches and kicks from unarmed 18-yr-old "kids" here. People have been killed by kids who were actual kids, not old enough to sign up, drive and vote, quite a lot around the world. 18 is quite possibly as big as or bigger than the victim. He certainly considered himself big enough and hard enough to take the guy down and rob him, and 18's old enough to be responsible for that decision and its consequences.

Also: you don't fire warning shots. Warning shots don't come out of the barrel, remember they're warning shots and just disappear. They're bullets. They do what they're designed to do: carry kinetic energy away until they hit something, then transfer that energy into whatever they hit. In video games, bullets that hit scenery (or "Brush: Structural" in some cases) tend to turn into black circles and just stay there. In reality, that lead is still out there and that kinetic energy and momentum have to go somewhere. Shoot a free-hanging Masterlock [http://theboxotruth.com/docs/bot5.htm] with a 9mm and the energy goes into flattening the bullet and jamming the lock up, and that's okay. Shoot it with a .45 and it goes into flattening the bullet without even jamming the lock, and that's okay too, but shoot a solid concrete kerbstone or paving slab or a tarmac road or a brick wall or a car engine and you get this fascinating effect called a ricochet which, no matter what you may find in games or historic articles or films called Blown Away, is a rather unpredictable object. It's a junk of jagged metal going at somewhere between 100mph and maybe 600mph, tumbling as it goes, just inviting fate to put some unlucky innocent's flesh in its way and ruin your life.

The guy shot 8 times, only hit 4. The doesn't seem to be a crack shot or really trained because 50% is pretty bad, especially at close range. One could wager that the guy got punched in the face, pulled the gun, and started firing randomly in the general direction of his attackers. And considering he only aimed and didn't shoot at the other kid who ran away showed that he actually did have some constraint.

This seems reasonable.

It would be pretty silly to chide someone for reacting in the way he did, if someone starts beating on me, it doesn't make sense to try and run back, pull a gun, and try to get the attackers to surrender. Another fist could easily hit you in the back of the head or temple and knock you out, the attackers are close enough and possibly stupid enough that when you're pulling the gun and not firing they could try to take it. And who knows the story could've gone much differently if the guy didn't come out with his gun firing, he could've ended up with the gun turned against him and him dead on the ground and two teens at large with money in their pocket laughing it up.

This, too. The part that does bother me is where the other four went. It must take a very level head to do it, but the right thing to do immediately after an incident like that is check where eight bullets finished up and whether anybody else is hurt. The shot mugger can bleed out while I check the locals, in fact.

Also: I'm curious why he shot so many times, and why he'd think someone was armed if they'd just punched him in the face.

How long did it take you to think of that? Half a second? Two seconds? Three? Ten? How long did he have to think about it?

He shot until the threat to his life wasn't threatening his life.

And further more, aren't hollow-point bullets designed to cause more damage? Why is a man walking around with a handgun full of those?

That's a yes-and-no answer. They're designed to open up on impact and make a bigger hole, bringing the target down more quickly, which is good for not having to chase deer for miles and good for quickly stopping the nutter with the AK47 in the mall from doing any more damage, and to make that bigger hole and do all that damage to a metal bullet takes more energy, which has to come from the bullet's kinetic energy, so the bullet loses velocity, making it rather less dangerous 100m down the street or the far side of a couple of interior walls after it's been through the target and meaning it's lost momentum, which goes into the target, meaning he gets knocked back harder. I've seen the argument that the increased likelihood of knocking him down with one or two shots means you're less likely to have to shoot him four or five times so he's more likely to survive ... but I don't feel like agreeing with that, haven't checked the data to know whether it's true and don't really care about the survival of some _______ who jumps me in the park half as much as I care about the kids looking over the park from bedroom windows behind him at the time.

To my knowledge, hollow points are designed to hit and not penetrate through the other side.

Nah, that's frangibles, like Glaser Safety Slugs. $14-20 for 6 rounds [http://www.shopcorbon.com/Glaser-Safety-Slug/500/500/dept] versus $20-25 for 20 rounds JHP [http://www.shopcorbon.com/Glaser-PowRBall/600/600/dept] makes them a rather expensive habitual load, though, and you wouldn't want to carry the weapon loaded with a round you're not used to firing.

He didn't gun down the kid who ran away, so he must have had some sense of control, not just a berserk rage.

Indeed.

You know he could of just pistol whipped him, or shot him in the leg in self defence, rather than shoot him eight times with the intention of making him dead.

Wrong. See above about warning shots and disabling shots. If you're not out to shoot him dead, don't shoot him. Try to pistol-whip someone who knows what he's doing and isn't woozy from being punched in the mouth and you're likely to have the pistol taken off you and your arm broken or your arm folded round until the gun's pointing at your head, still in your hand.

no one has the right to kill anybody no matter what they do.

Seriously?!? That "89" in your username isn't your year of birth, is it? You can't really have hit 22 years old without ever hearing about a situation that warranted killing someone, can you?

And that one of those is apparently wired tight enough to pump eight rounds into a guy in "self-defense."

Firstly, getting jumped on and punched in the face can result it an adrenalin rush that makes someone go from "relaxed" to "wired tight" in a couple of heartbeats, meaning inside one second.

Secondly, it wasn't "self-defense." It was self-defence. He was defending himself.

The fact that this happened and so many people condone it sickens me. Why not just make mugging punishable by the death penalty? It's the equivalent.

Heh. If they were willing to follow through with their logic, which they have proven they are not. Why use that line of reasoning if you can't defend it all the way?

Okay. Fine. You want some sort of sensible response to your bollocks? Here you go.

I'm a woman, driving alone at night. I'm approaching a traffic light. It's red, so I slow down and cruise towards it in 2nd (that's 2nd gear, something manual-transmission cars have), hoping not to have to stop before it goes green for me. There's nobody else around until, suddenly, six young men with four big knives, a crowbar, a small revolver, a roll of duct tape, six hard-ons and six woolly ski masks come out of an alley and rush to surround the car.

I kick the clutch and accelerator to the floor, making the engine scream, ease the clutch back up and tear forwards through the red light, leaving them behind. I have just run a red light, but the law says it was okay under the circumstances. I may well have run over a foot or two in the process, but the law says that's okay too under the circumstances.

With me so far?

Now let's say the same thing happens to another woman and she's stupid and gets hauled out of the car and gang-raped in that alley. Does that justify always running that red light? No, probably not.

See the difference? One of them's action taken to prevent violent criminals from completing their violent crime at the time. The other's action taken afterwards because they did the crime.

I dont feel the same pity that I think most would if they just heard the story and only heard what the title said.

This is a good point. The title says "after" and it would be more accurate to say "while" there.

A) who the hell carries a revolver (with hollow point and a laser sight he must think hes a hit man or something..)

A revolver? He fired eight shots from a .45 revolver? Colour me IMPRESSED!

going out on a late night run..? And its was a concealed weapon, who other than the police and the army carry licenses for a pistol and to also conceal it..?

Pretty much everybody in Florida, last I heard. Which licences are available and to whom varies a lot. Some states will charge you with brandishing if someone catches a glimpse of your weapon under your jacket. Some will call it concealed if you close the flap on the holster.

B) who goes out on late night runs, just ludicrous..

Apparently, young men wanting to join the military do. So do people who work night shifts or late evening shifts, like bar staff, restaurant waiters, security guards, soldiers, caretakers, hospital janitors, nurses, doctors, firemen, the police, truckers, gritter drivers .....

What? You want to impose an overnight curfew on everybody? "Ihr Papieren, bitte."

C) if you have a license for said concealed gun then why isn't he trained to use it properly and knee-cap his attacker instead of shooting them, 4 times, in the chest..

Shooting the guy in the chest IS using the gun properly.

D) these muggers were unarmed and posed a seriously limited effect to his life and so fatal force was unnecessary.

Posed an effect? WTF?

Unarmed muggers are potentially lethal. Unarmed muggers who knock you out and take your gun are potentially lethal to you and a lot of other people afterwards. People have been killed by punches. People have been killed by thugs who beat them to the ground and kicked them in the head for having the temerity to ask them to turn the stereo down.

How the heck was he supposed to be sure they were unarmed?

F) death is not a suitable punishment for battery, if it was then the death rate by state execution would amount to something like several hundred thousand per year whereas its only about 100 or more currently..

Self-defence is not the same thing as punishment. When attacked, you deal with the fact you are being attacked. One you are no longer being attacked, you do things like calling the police, making statements, getting checked out at hospital, going to court and so on. The court sentences people to periods in jail or fines them or whatever as punishment and/or deterrent and/or to rehabilitate them afterwards. It can't go back in time and teleport the mugger into jail to prevent him smashing your face in in the first place. Stopping him from doing that is self-defence. It's not the same thing.

EDIT: also soldiers, are always told to inform any civilians that they will open fire if said civilian does not surrender. Kinda proves that no-one outside of law-enforcement and the army should be allowed a gun, and these groups having guns is debatable as well..

Bullshit and WTF?

Bullshit that soldiers warn everybody. If a soldier on patrol sees someone aiming a rifle into the married quarters with his finger on the trigger or someone crouching next to the back wall of a packed bar with his hands in a sports bag with loops of wire protruding from it, that someone is getting shot with no warning. You don't **** around warning someone who's in a position to kill you, your mate's wife or a couple of dozen others in quarter of a second. You shoot him.

WTF are you on with not wanting the army to have guns? Seriously, wtf do you expect an army without guns to do? Tap the nice Special Police gentleman on the shoulder and ask him if he wouldn't mind awfully pulling his cock back out of the Kosovar Albanian girl, pulling his trousers back up and letting her and her mother go home? Throw dung at the IRA? Charge at the Taliban wielding sharpened slices of mango?

And for a former military man ... Maybe he was old, and it's been a while.

Citing the state's 'stand your ground' law they ruled the 28-year-old was entitled to protect himself.

Baker, who was out jogging to get fit before applying to join the military, said he always carried a handgun.

I think the people who are complaining about the 8 shots aren't considering the situation. It's dark, the victim of the mugging's been hit in the head and is dizzy. How's he going to even know how many shots actually hit the guy? As far as I can tell in a situation like that the only indication that he's hit the guy enough will be if the guy goes down. Similarly the people complaining about him not shooting the mugger in the leg seem to not be considering the situation either. How's he going to aim at the guy's leg in the dark when he's been hit in the head? And it isn't as if the mugger is going to sit there waiting for him to shoot him in the leg.

As for not warning the mugger that he has a gun, the mugger is right in his face hitting him. Does that really give him the distance to hold the mugger off with the gun? Is he in a state to hold onto the gun should the mugger try and take it from him? I'm highly doubtful the answer to either of those is yes.

As for the few that act as if this is the same as calling for the death sentence for all muggers, that's utter nonsense. The danger inherent in that situation is why it would be justified to shoot, and possibly kill, the mugger. Once they're nicely sitting in a jail cell, then we can afford to have mercy on them without endangering people.

Thank goodness you're here.

I notice how they have a lovely smiling picture of the teen and a deranged looking police shot of Baker!

Caption under second picture:

Accused: Suspect Jared Loughner is alleged to have shot dead six people in a gun rampage in Arizona last weekend

Jogging in the middle of the night?

Maybe he works .

Firstly, I didn't read the thread properly at all when I posted (not my finest hour on here unfortunately, but that was a while ago). Secondly, why are you necroing old threads?

 

[Shoqiyqa]

40 hours is "necro" now?

Did you really have to quote all my replies to everybody?

 

[Masticate]

I may be too logical for this gun debate thing, but in order for yourself to be able to defend yourself, doesn't there need to be a threat first?

Nope.

Under that "logic" of yours, if someone pointed a toy gun at you and threatened to shoot you, and you killed him, you'd be unjustly defending yourself because there was no threat.

Besides, you call being punched in the face, bleeding, half blind and discombobulated... not a thread?